Reasoning in Multi-Context Systems

Atanas Georgiev and Christo Dichev

Overview

This project presents an approach to formalization of some
aspects of common-sense human reasoning, such as locality
of reasoning, sketchiness of reasoning, locality of
inconsistencies, and ability to specialize and generalize
situations.

The reasoning process is broken into local reasoning fragments
each of which is associated with a context. A context is thought
of as a logical theory presented as an axiomatic formal system
consisting of a language, a set of axioms and a set of inference
rules. A multi-context system is defined as a pair of a set of
contexts and a set of bridge rules -- inference rules switching
the reasoning process from one context to another.

Two separate sets of context inference rules are discussed and
their equivalence is proved. The most important result is that
the consistency of one context does not depend on the consistency
of any other context.

A set of operators for building a variety of compound contexts
on the basis of the initial ones is defined and demonstrated
through examples. A sample Prolog meta-interpreter is presented
as an illustration of some of the advantages and some of the
problems from the implementation point of view. Some ideas for
further extensions of this model are also outlined.